2040 Mobility Scenario Development Tool Released by Art Center College of Design

11 February 2008

Pasadena, California-based Art Center College of Design has released a scenario- and solution-building tool which is designed to be used in design workshops to address possible futures in the year 2040 as they relate to issues of sustainable mobility.

The tool, which is called Mobility Vision Integration Process (mVIP), is in public beta in the form of a deck of 109 cards, each representing a situation that affects the design of sustainable mobility solutions. A “hand” of eleven cards is drawn from two types of cards.

One type of card establishes the design context and consists of four categories: enterprise, axiom, customer, and constraint. The other type deals with ambient trends & issues that together describe the future within which the design context is placed. There are seven categories of trends and issues: energy, economy, society, ecology, technology, policy, and wildcard.

An online version can be played at www.mobilityvip.com, and physical decks of cards can be purchased from Art Center. The research project is sponsored by Ford Motor Company.

mVIP was designed by Art Center faculty members Lloyd Walker, Geoff Wardle, Andy Ogden, and Dave Muyres, and was introduced last week at Art Center’s Systems, Cities, and Sustainable Mobility summit. The summit was the second of a planned annual series of five summits intended to foster dialogue on sustainable mobility throughout the design community, or as Wardle put it, “how can we help?”

Held in a converted wind tunnel, the summit included display vehicles such as the Aptera, Fisker’s plug-in luxury performance hybrid, and a Mitsubishi i. A
sampling of conversations and presentations heard during the summit included:

John Mizroch of the Department of Energy encouraging participants to “keep stretching the definition of sustainability”.

The RoboScooter. Click to enlarge.

Raul-David “Retro” Poblano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announcing that the lightweight folding electric scooter (the RoboScooter) developed at MIT was moving toward commercial production, with an eye toward a public-sharing model based on successful bike-sharing projects such as Velib’ of Paris.

Alex Steffen of WorldChanging asking attendees to imagine the “last road”—a future in which new mobility systems created a world in which new roads were no longer needed.

Paul Hawken, author and founder of the Natural Capital Institute asking the students of Art Center “which civilization will you be designing for—the dying civilization, or the one after that?”